Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

We remade Japan with Japanese cooperation. In the end, you can only force your will so far, before you have to bring the other side’s will to bear. This can be done by agreement, guile, negotiation, intimidation, fear, and finally force.

However it is done, reaching practical results is more important than satisfying theoretical biases. History can be one of the best guides to such strategy, but it can also be one of the most misleading, if one overapplies theory, or presupposes things were known by the combatants that they didn’t. You can imagine motivations and objects of action that were not there, and thereby miss the nuts and bolts a clearer perspective might lead your mind’s eye to, had they been guided to more accurate representations.

Of course, history is a human affair, and not all facts are there to be seen.

Jack, you bring up Pearl Harbor as a way to advocate for the Viral Democracy plan the Bush Administration and you support. However, the fact is, Japan was converted into a Democracy over the course of a decade, in a pacified nation, and with the full submission and cooperation of the Japanese people.

The Bush administration is trying to do the same thing in the course of two years, in a land dealing with a war still unresolved, with a population largely hostile to our presence.

So far, in this occupation, we’ve lost 1281 soldiers, seen 9556 wounded. I doubt the numbers of American Dead in the Japanese occupation even broke triple digits.

My point isn’t that we should cease trying to change Iraq. Our leg’s in the beartrap on that one. No, What I think is that we should stop treating this as World War IV, with more battles to be fought. We’ve spent enough damn time trying to do things the hard way in Iraq. We aren’t an empire at heart, and if we choose to try and remake the Middle East as an American Empire, we will find ourselves bumping our heads into our own lack of ruthlessness.

And that’s the best case. What if we find out, we aren’t as lacking in the capacity to be ruthless as we thought? I think that will be a sad day for us. I think that will be the day we stop being the America our founding fathers envisioned.

I am a member of a Base Honor Guard with the Air National Guard. It’s truly an honor to be able to perform the funeral details for veterans, but especially the ones from WWII.
There’s only one better feeling… and that’s talking with the ones who are still alive.

Here’s the citation of the oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner, who received the medal for his actions at Pearl Harbor:

FINN, JOHN WILLIAM
Rank and organization: Lieutenant, U.S. Navy. Place and date: Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay, Territory of Hawaii, 7 December 1941. Entered service at: California. Born: 23 July 1909, Los Angeles, Calif. Citation: For extraordinary heroism distinguished service, and devotion above and beyond the call of duty. During the first attack by Japanese airplanes on the Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay, on 7 December 1941, Lt. Finn promptly secured and manned a .50-caliber machinegun mounted on an instruction stand in a completely exposed section of the parking ramp, which was under heavy enemy machinegun strafing fire. Although painfully wounded many times, he continued to man this gun and to return the enemy’s fire vigorously and with telling effect throughout the enemy strafing and bombing attacks and with complete disregard for his own personal safety. It was only by specific orders that he was persuaded to leave his post to seek medical attention. Following first aid treatment, although obviously suffering much pain and moving with great difficulty, he returned to the squadron area and actively supervised the rearming of returning planes. His extraordinary heroism and conduct in this action were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

In today’s vernacular, that’s what’s known as having balls…

The occupation of Japan took place after a very deadly war. The Marines suffered more than 28,000 casualties and nearly 7000 dead taking Mt. Suribachi. The war was over when the occupation of Japan began. As many people have pointed out, the Iraqi army ran off quickly, but the war is not over.

I came to my point while thinking about some of your comments. It is not the war part; it is the democracy part that I think is interesting. Japan had no history of democracy as we define the term before the war. I don’t think any informed observers would have believed that Japan would become what it did after the war. I don’t want to give up hope on the Arabs.

I mentioned many times my living in Poland. The Poles, especially the older generation, like Americans. Even if the public doesn’t always support our current policies, the leadership does because of their experience. Interestingly, the post communists are among the strongest supporters. One important reason is their memories of martial law in the 1980s. The German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt accepted martial law, saying something like the Poles had no experience with democracy anyway. Europeans in general sympathized and raised money to help people (deployed soft power), but almost nobody really spoke out or did anything to counter the Soviets and the military crackdown. Their reaction was based on what they would have called a realistic view. Only the U.S. and especially Ronald Reagan had confidence that democracy could overcome the evil empire in those dark days. A lot of other people were too sophisticated to believe that. This was especially true of American liberals. To their credit, they wanted to mitigate the situation, but they didn’t think they could change it. They all claim to have known that the Soviet Union was finished, but all you have to do is look at some of the things they wrote at the time.

I recognize that Poland is not the same as Iraq or any other Arab country. But I am afraid that our prejudice is like Helmut Schmidt’s. You talked about history being misleading. Maybe it is in this case now. In human events there are tipping points. In 1945 no sophisticated person would have believed democracy was possible in Germany or Japan. In the middle 1970s, we were saying that there was something about Latin Americans that made democracy nearly impossible there. About this same time we were talking about Asia responding only to strong rulers. By the middle 1980s, western intelligentsia criticized the stupid cold warriors who thought the Soviet Empire would collapse. When it began to come apart, they talked about its imminent descent into chaos. It is the turn of the Arab world. Change is not easy and maybe they will disappoint, but I think they need a chance, even if many people don’t seem to want it.

It is important to remember that the Iraqis don’t have to like us in order to benefit from what we did. Not all Iraqis dislike us anyway. Have you ever spoken to a Kurd? It is embarrassing how supportive they can be.

Jack-
The ferocity of the Pacific theatre of the war is undenied. Fact is, though, when the so-called occupation began, the war was definitively over, and the Japanese people wanted it that way.

That’s not the case in Iraq, and that’s what’s crippling our efforts. We having to fight a war and remake a country at the same time. It means that our enemy can forever hold our efforts hostage with their violence. We have to first win the war completely, then attempt to rebuild the country. Otherwise, one necessary objective will get in the way of the other.

What you’re trying to set up is faith-based military strategy, where we set out without a plan, but with a whole load of self-righteousness, all with the purpose of evangelizing viral Democracy, which, if you’ve looked at Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, has been a hard germ to catch.

And, if you haven’t noticed, we’ve been fighting little brushfire wars for the past decade, since the soviets collapsed. What do you think Yugoslavia was about? What do you think Somalia, and all the issues with the power struggles in the former Soviet Union are about. In case you haven’t noticed, Russia is edging ever closer, under former KGB agent Putin, back into authoritarian territory. Meanwhile, we left Afghanistan, now free of the Russians, to sort itself out, and we ended up with the Taliban. The Middle East too sorted itself out. That was the Gulf War. And al-Queda, and any number of other little vicious problems.

I can understand why a Kurd would be so supportive. But can you understand why the Sunnis and Shiites might distrust us, or are you so busy congratulating your party on it’s righteousness, and wisdom of course that you fail to see where their attitudes could outweigh and pull the rug out from under the Kurd’s sympathies.

This isn’t about who is a true believer in Democracy and good and right things. I don’t oppose you or anybody else so passionately because I believe American to be unworthy of my praise, or its defense unworthy of the highest and greatest actions possible. I oppose you because I think you guys are overconfident in your own wisdom, and negligent towards your mistakes in intelligence and action. I think your party’s hubris is hurting this country, and because I love this country, I will not stand to see incompetence, corruption, and cynical politics aid our enemies in their efforts.

We want things done right. Whether it gets aggrandized in political rhetoric is quite beside the point.

Jack,

Maybe I have missed the point of this post, other than today was Dec. 7.

In 1941 Japan was a country trying to gain an advantage in the Pacific. They had few natural resources and America wasn’t going to help them. By taking out the fleet at Pearl Harbour they thought they could close their grip on the resources of the western Pacific rim, allowing them to gain economic dominance in the area.
Japan had a ineffective emperor and their country was basicly run by the military.
After a war that lasts four years culminating with the deployment of two atom bombs on two Japanese cities, Japan capitulates. MacAurther goes in sets up an interum government that eventually becomes a Democracy.

Fast forward.

Sep.11 2001. America has it’s troops in Saudia Arabia and at other bases in the region. A group of mostly Saudi nationals that had been in America for quite awhile learning how to fly but not how to land airliners hijacks and crashes three planes into American buildings and a fourth into the Pennsylvania countryside.

Fast forward.

March 2003. America invades the soverign nation of Iraq run by a ruthless, loonytoons, would be emperor, who has designs on becoming the next Nebecanezer and would like to rebuild the hanging gardens.
Oh, by the way, he “might” have WMDs because he says he doesn’t and won’t show them to us. He also “may” have tenuous ties to a guy America failed to find in another invasion we staged one year earlier, but it’s ok because we will make sure before we leave that Iraq has free and democratic elections.

You know Jack, the more I read this, the more the senarios in Iraq and Japan sound the same.

Hey Jack, good article. If only Bush had gone after bin Laden the way FDR went after Japan…

Stephen

If I knew back in early 2003 what we know now, we would have behaved differently in Iraq. I don’t mean about the lack of WMD. There were plenty of other reasons to be rid of Saddam Hussein. That is why President Clinton made regime change there a policy way back in 1998. But I don’t know what would have happened under different scenarios and I am not sure they would have been better. The ideal situation, go in with UN support, was precluded by the French, who told the world and us that they would never sign onto a resolution to forcefully eject Saddam. The U.S. and coalition troop building that forced Saddam to cooperate was unsustainable, and the French (and others) call to just keep them there to contain Saddam was also unsustainable.

You remember that Osama bin Laden’s chief grievance against the U.S. was that American troops were in Saudi and they were in Saudi to contain Saddam Hussein. (Even though American troops have now left Saudi, I haven’t yet heard any softening from Osama bin Laden.) Containment was not cost free.

So, let’s rewind to March 2003. We decide Hans Blix is right. What do we do? Pulling all the troops back to where? Saudi, the U.S. The sanctions would certainly have collapsed at this point. (Another thing we know now that we didn’t know then was how corrupt the oil for food program had become, so sanctions were almost gone anyway as far as Saddam was concerned.) The Arab street would have erupted at American weakness and perfidiousness. I really am not sure the situation would be better today than it is now. It might be worse.

There were no good solutions available to deal with Saddam Hussein. The “stability” of the Middle East was not something to be preserved. Change is coming to that region and hell is coming with it. Places like Saudi, Kuwait and maybe even Egypt will within the next decade have radical changes of government. This is not something we can avoid or even postpone very long. There is a three-way civil war going on in the Arab world, between and among secularists, Islamists and the old orders. The old order ranges from religious old order like Saudi to Arab fascists like Syria, but secularists and Islamists are present in all these places too. In many ways, Arabs have succeeded in getting us involved in their civil war. Of course, on top of this we have the thousand-year-old civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites. All sides can ostensibly blame the U.S., but eventually, and sooner rather than later, something has to give. The best we can do is be in a strong position to adapt to whatever comes. Hard times are coming, but I don’t think that the Iraq invasion is what provoked them. In fact, we may look at it as a necessary benefit that we have a strong position in the heart of the Arab world, because unfortunately, we can’t avoid involvement in this benighted region. It reaches out an touches us in too many ways.

Problem with us interceding directly and belligerently as we have is that our military presence is not a neutral act. The situation in the Middle East is post-colonial, and thus bears the scars of forced and often humiliating schemes of modernization and reform which ran smack dab into cultural values and traditions without accommodation. Result? There is a cultural bias against reform and modernization that must be delicately overcome.

We barged in, instead. We left our supporters out on a limb trying to justify our invasion (or unable to do so)so they are unable to sincerely argue that Saddam provoked us unwisely.

The more we force things in the Middle East, the stronger the resistance will be, and the more radicalized and backwards the society will become. Instead of viral democracy, we will have festering chaos. In foreign policy, the good doctrine is that of a doctor: first, do no harm. Don’t make things worse than they already are. Don’t aggravate the very people you are trying to reform.

I think you rewind the clock back too short of a time. We shouldn’t have even put the prestige of the United States on the line by announcing our intention to invade in 2002. We should have worked to improve our intelligence gathering capabilities, toughened homeland security, and then go after Iraq only if a clear, reliable case could be me made to do so, because the invasion of Iraq has been a substantial diversion of time, resources and reputation with few good results to show for it.

To be clear: Results matter most to me, and to anybody who approaches military affairs with an iota of sense. It doesn’t matter how glorious our intentions or ambitions are, if the end result is lousy, we must judge our plans and our strategies lousy as such. If you want any hope of having your strategy succeed, you must change it, because so far the results have been terrible, and even you must admit how bad the situation is at the moment.

I don’t know about the situation. I was getting a little discouraged, but today I attended a presentation by some guys who had recently been to Iraq. They mentioned the usual problems, but were generally upbeat about the future.

For example, they said that we have to look at the country as being pacified in sections. When something the media stops reporting on something, it means it is probably okay. The media no longer reports on anything in the Kurdish area or even previous (and recently) “unsolvable” problems like Najaf because they are no longer problems.

They had interesting insights into Fallujah. In May, they said, the military was within a couple of days of taking the city, but were called off by the political leadership. This was no accident. When the insurgents begin to lose militarily, they play the media game much harder and sometimes the media attention makes impossible continued action. They also pointed out that more than 300 mosques in Fallujah were being used as ammunition dumps and fortresses. The Arab media show bullet holes in the Mosques as evidence that the U.S. doesn’t respect it. On the contrary, this shows how careful the soldiers have been. If the U.S. wants uses real force, there are no bullet holes, there is just nothing left.

Anyway, they said that the situation on the ground is a lot better than we see on the news most days. They admitted that “information” is now in the battle space and that we are doing less well with this aspect. But they also said that they are learning how to tell their story better.

One guy gave an example of the problem we have explaining. He compared a military operation to someone who is getting a hip transplant. You walk into the operating room. Blood is squirting all over. They are sawing through bones and cutting muscle tissue. The doctor tells you the operation is going okay, but it is hard to believe him. At some point, though, the operation is finished and you can see the results.

I don’t suppose this changes your mind, but I found them compelling and credible. They don’t expect the next couple of weeks to be easy, on the contrary, the bad guys will do all they can to create chaos and drive up the civilian casualties. In the battlefield of information, they have a chance to win what they can’t on the more traditional battlefield. The worst possible scenario for the insurgents is a reasonably content population after a reasonably free election.

But they did point to solid progress in the country outside the Sunni triangle and reminded me that in May the Shiites showed some solidarity with the insurgents in Fallujah. Last month, they showed none at all. They don’t want to show open support for the U.S., but by doing nothing, they are helping the cause.

Jack:

I don’t know what weed you are smoking but the reason the Shiites did not show any support for the Sunnis in Fallujah is because Iraq is now in the verge of a Civil War. There are already Shiite Militias formed dedicated to fight the Sunnis. You are again falling for the Spin. Sad.

Aldous.

They had interesting insights into Fallujah. In May, they said, the military was within a couple of days of taking the city, but were called off by the political leadership. This was no accident. When the insurgents begin to lose militarily, they play the media game much harder and sometimes the media attention makes impossible continued action.

Sound perfectly idiotic to me.

You’re the ones who are queasy about the war when you start making tactical and strategical decisions based on political consulting and unafavorable media coverage from unfriendly countries. You aren’t going to win hearts and minds with a chronic war, and a chronic war is what you’re going to have when you won’t just rip the bandage off and do what you have to do to get the job done. You talk like you’re so macho, but then you suggest we pattern our strategy on playing nice with audiences biased against us. al-Jazeera can go to hell, for all I care, if they’re not going to tell people the truth. We need to win this war, not their audience.

Look, you want to win the battle of information, win the battles, and let the information they carry back ring with the discouraging difficulties of maintaining their jihad in the midst of Iraq against the American. Let the information that defeats them be bad news, because anything else will be belied by the reality of the facts on the ground. We will not bring this war to life by clapping and exclaiming that we believe in counter-insurgencies. We will bring it to life by having the means to do what we need to do and bringing those means whole-heartedly into the fight. Anything else invites violence against our troops, and emboldens our enemies.

Put simply, Jack, we have got to stop fighting the next war of the twenty-first century, and start fighting the war we’re in right now. We’ve got to stop putting our trust in the new way of winning wars, and start putting it in the right way to win wars. we’ve got to stop seeing how few troops we can use to win our battles, and start using enough to ensure that there’s never a question of whether we win. This isn’t the P-E Ratio we’re trying to bulk up, it’s the military win column. We use overwhelming force, we don’t do things halfway, and we don’t get so cute with our strategies and technologies that we’re caught with our pants down making these things work as they employ timely, tried and true methods against us. This Bullshit Rumsfeld puts forward about fighting the war with the army you got stinks to high heaven. You fight the war with the Army you need. Anything else invites disaster. History has demonstrated that time and again, and no amount of theory will overturn the verdicts cast so far.

Stephen, Jack,

We need to remember what it actually takes to win a war. This great push for technology started in the sixties.

Other than outspending the Soviet Union to its knees, when was the last “WAR” we won?

Stephen

If I perceive this correctly, you are running to my right.

Let me sum up what I think you are saying and what we probably agree about. We need to fight a consequent war. Those who do us harm should be done in. On the other hand, we need to play to the political realities of Iraq.

I generally agree with the Bush strategy, but I don’t represent his line. As I wrote above, I believe we are in for radical change in the Middle East and I don’t think there is much we can, or should, do to prevent it. There will be a three-way struggle within Islam among the status quo (both traditional rulers and Arab fascists), secularist and fundamentalists. This will happen whether or not we do anything, but as the world’s superpower, we will get dragged in. Our best outcome is some compromise that makes Islam a more moderate force. This change is long overdue and necessary for the Arab Muslim world to become part of the modern world. Our best strategy to achieve that is to be in a strong position to be flexible because we can’t currently foresee how this will play out. Predictions by experts don’t work when you have a radical paradigm shift. Imagine how NOT useful it was to the world’s leading expert on East German politics in 1989.

Aldous

I don’t disagree with your assessment either. Read again my earlier post. The Shiites and the Sunnis have hated each other for more than 1000 years. They hate each other more than either hates non-Muslims. It is only in the west that we believe that Islam is a united front. The long wars between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shiite Persians is one of the great political-military-religious conflicts in world history. We should study it, but usually don’t. Saddam Hussein was clearly carrying on this conflict by oppressing the Shiites and many of them probably think it is pay back time. In the long sweep of ethnic hatred, the U.S. invasion may not even be a footnote.

My own point of view is that a partitioned Iraq is better than a united Saddam Iraq. Iraq, after all, is just a British creation that is not even 100 years old. Mesopotamia may have been the cradle of civilizations, but if you glace through a historical atlas, you find nothing that resembles modern Iraq. It was either part of a greater empire or partitioned. By the way, the Kurds have been there longer than anyone else currently occupying the country, with the exception of the small Assyrian and Chaldean minorities. Arabs are recent arrivals, as far as things go around there.

The Sunnis should realize that U.S. power is the only thing that might protect them. But if they continue to attack us, I think we can let them have what they say they want. The oil wealth is in Shiite and Kurdish areas, and some of the Sunnis might want to glance at a map before they made decisions about insurgencies. I believe we owe the Kurds. Making sure the Kurds were reasonably secure would be a goal I would support, whether that was inside a “united” Iraq or not.

Jack, I don’t think that Turkey would enjoy a Kurdish state as a neighbor.

Places like Saudi, Kuwait and maybe even Egypt will within the next decade have radical changes of government.

Jack, you are so right about that. Before the war, Hosni Mubarak predicted,

You do not understand the consequences of your actions. If you succeed militarily - and you will - and if Iraq were to become a democracy, it would almost surely elect a religious extremist government.

You will end up with another ayatollah as the head of the government.

And that election could cause a cascading throughout the Middle East. The result of your actions, whatever their intentions, could well be two or three more Irans. Is that what you want?

It’s also interesting to note that the US has traditionally supported Sunnis (like Saddam and the House of Saud) over Shiites because Sunnis are considered more moderate.

So when the Shiites win the election, it shouldn’t be long before they merge with Iran to form the beginnings of a new pan-Arab caliphate. I wonder which two or three other countries Mubarak was talking about…

You perceive incorrectly. The willingness to wage war has never been an exclusively Right-Wing quality. Neither has the unwillingness to wage war been solely invested in the left wing, either. It’s simpler to believe that, of course, because it means you only have to deal with one point of view, one you can obviously oppose without much discomfort, conscience-wise. Ah, but what if you have to deal with a non-pacifist point of view that nonetheless proceeds from a left-wing or centrist point of view.

Your solution has been to simply lump us in with those who oppose war utterly, to say that we are weaker in respect to fighting war. But no such thing is true across the spectrum of non-pacifist democrats and liberals. In fact, you’re dealing here with somebody who doesn’t bring the notion of getting the job done from an ideological standpoint, but instead from a pragmatic outlook on things. If our soldiers were getting absolutely slaughtered, and we weren’t making progress, I would have us withdraw and regroup, then attack again.

But if it’s negative media coverage that inspires that withdrawal, that’s a whole other story. If there is no military reason to pull back, no overarching humanitarian reason, no real settlement and/or withdrawal on the part of our enemy, it is only military conventional wisdom that you don’t break off the offensive. We might be standing here with half the casualites we might otherwise have suffered for the enemy occupation of Fallujah.

If had my druthers, we wouldn’t be there in the first place. Again, you would say I believe this from ideological grounds. Again, you would be mistaken. If anything, my ideology springs from the pragmatic side of things. We have a war to deal with, beyond the bounds of the Middle East. We had one war unfinished, one country still a shambles and in need of reconstruction, one very dangerous enemy who has since proven that his dislodgement from his Afghanistan safe haven has not made him any less lethal an opponent. We had no business starting another war unless the situation was genuinely dire. Which it was not.

You say we’d be too late if we waited. Well, that’s if we waited and did nothing. Options, however, were open for keeping Saddam in check without the use of military force.

You get wrapped up in what a bad man he is, in all the Munich/Hitler comparisons, making every decision not to go to war an act of cowardice in the face of evil. You neglect that Munich was itself a failure to contain a tyrant’s territorial ambitions, not a failure to take a tyrant from power. Most of the time, we do ourselves more harm than good trying to change countries by force.

Invading Iraq has reduced our flexibility, our ability to manuever diplomatically and militarily in the region. That is the effect of our committment in the region. You want more soldiers there? You’ll have to draft them. It also presents a huge target, in and of itself for radical Islam. Remember that Muslims are called upon by religious duty to defend Muslims? Well, that’s the call going out, and by your own estimations of how many of these insurgents are foreigners, the call has been effective. We will not win by attrition because of this- we got a pool of millions of willing recruits, ready to take a piece of our ass.

As for predictions by experts not working? Well, unfortunately, they have, more than likely to admit. On troop numbers, on WMDs, on the evidence for going to war, on the occupation itself. People all over the place knew of problems, but we just didn’t hear from them when we should have.

As for the status of an expert on East German politics post 1989, you may think them obsolete, but that is only a superficial way of looking at things. An expert on East German politics remains such. They can repurpose their knowledge to dealing with politicians, institutions and communities that got their start under the system. They can tell you why some people may be so passionate about certain interests, they can tell you how a certain leader came to power and what they did in the past. The past creates the present, and though we cannot know all things about it, we can learn the true shape of the present and how it got there. If we don’t learn those things, and act, then the world we try to manipulate will not move as we expect it to, because our superficial understanding hides an ignorance of the interests and desires of those we seek to change.

Maybe the Middle East is sick of being changed, manipulated by outside forces. Maybe the attempt to make it over by itself is provocative. Maybe the attempt to lord our power over them is the very thing that makes them mad at us. Understanding this, understanding their culture, we might find better ways to approach them to get what they want. Frame it in terms of “You are with us or against us, don’t get in our way” and you may not get far. Frame it in terms of “We know your struggle, you know you want to stand with us as equals, we want what you want: autonomy and cooperation instead of imperalism and coercion.” and you might get somewhere.

In terms of the sectarian conflicts, our problem is that we put ourselves right in the middle of it. We have nothing to benefit from a partitioned Iraq. We need a strong counterbalance to Iran’s power in the region, if we don’t want them to become the superpower of choice there. The Sunnis are not going to look at things from the simple point of view of fresh self-interest, but rather from the much older, and much more attached self-interest of lost power, power that carried with it the oil wealth.

You have to consider that people do not view their self-interests from abstract outside perspective but from their own experience. In some ways their understanding of their situation is superior because it comes from experience. We might have done well not to expect a warm welcome from the shiites we abandoned post-Gulf War, but for reasons I can’t understand, the Neocons bought that silly idea that they would welcome us without reserve.

I don’t know. You must empathize with the other side, figure out what their wishes hopes, desires and prejudices are, before you even think of trying to impose a solution on them. This war should be teaching all you conservatives about the price of ignorance-born strategy, but unfortunately, you’ve used the loophole of the uncertainties of war to maintain your ideological fervor. I fear we will see much tragedy in our lives because of that.

Stephen,

Please see this article from today’s Washington Post re can liberals’ fight. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49824-2004Dec8.html. The liberals’ pacifist reputation was earned by the behavior of leading liberals from the 1970s until today. It is the mirror of the stereotype that conservatives are always looking to fight wars (when all the major U.S. wars of the 20th Century actually started under Democratic presidents.) To the non-pacifist liberals, I say welcome back to the fight; this time I know our side will win.

Re East German experts. I knew some of these poor guys. Their knowledge of German remains useful, but you could as easily build a new expert from scratch as repurpose an old one whose country of study has disappeared. (The E. Germans themselves had an interesting experience like this when they tried to retrain Russian teachers to teach English. Didn’t work.) The other problem was that many of Western experts on E. Germany had entirely too much sympathy for the system there. I was at a conference the day the wall came down listening to experts explain that the problems in E. Germany were temporary and that they system was fundamentally sound. I wouldn’t put much faith in their advice. Getting invested in the current system is a problem for an expert in any subject. It is in the nature of a paradigm shift to make expert opinion obsolete and maybe even harmful. You see it all the time in business and sometimes in politics. Experts on the Arab world are often “captured” by their subjects. The only one I can think of offhand that is critical is Bernard Lewis.

Re counterbalance to Iran. For nearly 2000 years the counterbalance of Iran depended on a power based strongly in Anatolia. The territory that now makes up Iraq was never anything more than a borderland between the power based on the Iranian highlands and its rival in Anatolia and the Balkans, and never a political unit at all until the Brits created it in the 1920s.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, since some of the same issues, people and geography abides. A partition of Iraq may be the next line of the song. I don’t think we will face a legal partition, but we sure won’t have a strong unitary state. What that might mean for the U.S. is part of the new paradigm.

Finally, I think the elections will go off as planned and produce a reasonable result. After this happens, the experts will settle into explaining why this was inevitable and how the Bush policy had nothing to do with it. It will be an imperfect democracy so they will also find a lot of things to complain about - sort of like they did in Afghanistan. But it will be better than what went before and better than predicted by the experts.

To the non-pacifist liberals, I say welcome back to the fight; this time I know our side will win.

Don’t take your arm out of socket patting yourself on the back. We never went away. Besides, you’ve underestimated 9/11’s impact on the left-wing. I mean, hell, our little world capital gets trashed, and you think liberals don’t want payback? Half of our frustration with Bush is his failure to reduce al-Qaeda to little bits of bite-sized fish food.

I don’t want to live in fear, but I every time I look up, I see something that gives me cause to worry. I mean, will the new intelligence director have the budget authority, or will he be a bureaucratic figurehead? According to my brother, 80 percent of the intelligence agencies that were supposed to go under this new intelligence director aren’t. I would love to see the silver lining at this point, but right now, all I see are the conclusions of the report that accompany the next commission on the next terrorist attack, saying, these people knew, but they let bureaucratic infighting, ideology, and politics get in the way of doing what needed to be done. I am extremely frustrated at the resistance of this administration to reforms needed in the wake of 9/11.

Iraq is a betrayal of our country’s interests, just to settle old scores from a world order killed dead by 9/11. I’m sure they have the best intentions, just not the best understanding, the best awareness of the situation we’re in. They’re fighting a second cold war, trying to amp it up into a second WWII, while not doing nearly enough to combat our real enemies, and deal with the real situation.

The worst thing about it, is they are going to take this worthless story of a clash of civilizations and by their actions make it a self fulfilling prophecy that’ll probably sink us into a century of worthless, bloody wars.

Forgive me if I have little respect or patience for those who hide behind the bravery and sacrifice of our soldiers while unthinkingly offering forth calls to arms against people who had nothing to do with the tragedy.

Jack, I don’t think you or many of the Republicans out there understand just how visceral this feeling is for many Democrats and liberals like me. This isn’t a variant on typical Bush-bashing, this is the seething, quiet outrage of people who just don’t understand how such cynicism or corruption, imcompetence and negligence be brought to bear. The more you know about what’s going on the greater this sick twist in your gut develops about the whole situation. And there is nothing I can do about it but write, persuade, convince, and express this profound sense of betrayal.

The anger you read is a good sign, because I think that things can be made better, that the dark fall of American power and values can be halted. If I were without hope, I would not continue writing. As it is, I hold on to my belief that there can be no compromise on our priorities here. I opposed Bush as strongly as I did because I believe he is all compromises, unable to say no to corporations, to counselors to spymasters and congressmen.

Fallujah represents the worst of those compromises. He left the terrorists a haven for more than half a year before he ordered the place cleaned out. In that time, hundreds of Americans have died. You talk about tipping points earlier? Well look at it this way: in not clearing Fallujah earlier, we may have given up the ability to deal with these things by taking out Fallujah alone.

To the non-pacifist liberals, I say welcome back to the fight;

We never left, Jack.

BTW, if you could name names instead of perpetuating the stereotype, that would be great. I don’t remember guys like Moynahan, Byrd, Mansfield, Charlie Wilson, “Tip” O’Neill or any other Democratic leaders being pacifists.

As for Iraq’s elections, I guarantee Bush will make them happen, and I guarantee their legitimacy will be questioned. But no matter who wins, Iraq will be governed by a fundamentalist Islamic government and Shariah law.

You can argue that’s better than having 1/3 of the country ruled by Saddam if you want. I’m not going to.

AP & Stephen

I remember the people you mentioned as non-pacifist Democrats. I even wrote a column in this blog asking Democrats to come home to their ideals and talked about my admiration for leaders like Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. One thing is true of the muscular Democrats most often mentioned: they are either dead, retired or near retirement. But nobody can deny that Democrats drifted to left-pacifism. Please read the article I included. It was in the liberal Washington Post, written by a liberal leaning pundit.

I am encouraged that you (AP & Stephen) are not among the pacifists. If too many good people are afraid of force, we leave all the initiative to the most aggressive. Pacifism is a leading cause of war. I will assure you that I am not among the warmongers.

I supported the war in Iraq because I thought it was necessary, not a good thing. With the information available at the time, it made sense. A lot of people have since claimed that they knew better or we should have known better. But I recall at the time a lot of the opposition was fairly shrill predictions of disaster from the attack itself. I don’t remember and can’t find (in an admittedly casual search) anyone who warned with any specificity that the actual war fighting would be very easy with light civilian casualties, but that the aftermath would be costly. The ones I can find just predict death and disaster in general: a costly and deadly invasion followed by a costly and deadly occupation. If these guys take credit for being half right, they have to concede that the administration’s prediction record was at least as good. Besides, most also predicted a lot worse for the post-war. Predicting about 1200 American fatalities during more than a year and a half of war and occupation would have been very tame.

Besides, this is not over. It is far too soon to call the Iraq operation a failure. Actually things are looking up. The news I read in the papers this morning indicates that elections are progressing. Their legitimacy will be questioned, but there are dead enders who even question elections in the U.S. We can’t let such people veto the political process that achieves the consent of (most of) the governed. We have pacified most of the country. Just two weeks ago the Paris Club creditors agreed to write off 80% of Iraq’s external official debt owed to its members. Despite continuing attacks on oil infrastructure, in September 2004, Iraq’s crude oil production averaged 2.54 million barrels per day, which equals pre-war levels. None of us can predict the future, but it looks like we will be viewing this more favourably next year than we do today.

Jack,
I was against the war in Iraq, not because I am a pacifist, but because of the rush to do it. In the rush to war we are forced to live with what we have on hand, not what we are truely capable of.
The first gulf war, even though more “necessary”, was better staged because we took the time to do it right.
Cheney and Rumsfeld should have known better, because they were a part of that.

How could Japan know that by destroying the Pacific fleet they actually made America stronger because they forced us to upgrade an aging fleet?

Jack-
Neither pacificism, nor your kind of belligerence will keep our country secure. A mixture of both? Not necessarily. Maybe just the willingness to chose one or the other at any point, should wisdom or knowledge point one in that direction. There will be no perfect solutions here, no approaches that keep us 100% safe and sound. There will be, though, approaches that keep us more secure than others. War is not value neutral, and you must keep that in mind. War will make some people enemies, who would otherwise be willing to reconcile and cooperate with us.

We must ask ourselves what opportunties we deny ourselves to defend our nation by peaceful methods before we commit to war. Above all things, whatever price we pay by going to war, we must be careful not to pay it for the wrong reasons. We must not sacrifice our integrity to appease our own paranoia.

The Democratic party drifted toward pacificism for a pretty good reason: we got burned on Vietnam, and that decimated our best folks in foreign policy, our best and our brightest. We have bitter memories of a war built on layers and layers of illusion, government secrecy, and political deception. I would argue we did get a little too gunshy on things, but only in the sense that we stopped being realistic about war.

To me, realism about war goes both ways. Some wars are necessary, some fights you have to have now, if you don’t want worse ones later. At the same time though, some wars you don’t want to get yourself involved in. Some wars you pass up and future generations bless your name for that. Vietnam was a war we should have passed up. We didn’t have the moral and political superiority to match our force superiority. Never underestimate the value of having right and the will of the people behind you

I will not offer you easy answers as to what qualifies a war to be fought, aside from these broad principles of integrity and sober analysis.

As for predictions of disaster, I remember most people offering those predictions only as a upper hedge, saying that when we do invade, it will be a dangerous and risky proposition. (since the president was alleging huge stores of chemical and biological warfare agents, was that such an unfounded fear?) This war has indeed proven riskier than we first thought. But I think few people doubted we would win. But why the casualties? Well, maybe we feel the president went to war for insufficient reasons, and we keep on reminding people of the casualties as a way of keeping the consequences of his unnecessary war front and center.

As I say in the newest posting I’ve done on the Democrat Blog, we don’t just point these things out to embarrass your people, we do it to motivate actions to be taken to improve the situations. Our frustration has been stirred as much by the refusal to take action as anything else. I do remember people saying that if we’re not careful about the occupation, we will find ourselves with an insurgency, with things spinning out of control. I do think the possibility was raised, but even Democrats and the media were surprised at how bad the problem would get.

Jack, to add to Stephen’s comment.

Good intentions alone are never a good reason to rush to war.

Guys

I don’t see a rush to war. I see twelve years of deception. Seventeen ignored Security Council resolutions. Attempts to kill Americans. Support of terrorism. I see that President Clinton declared regime change in Iraq a U.S. goal – in 1998. I see that Bush tried to work with the UN.

Then I see Iraq as it was. UNESCO estimates that 50,000 children were dying each year because of sanctions. How much longer could we keep them? We now know that the oil for food programs was already subverting them. We thought that Saddam had WMD, and as a matter of fact, the WMD he had in the 1990s is still not accounted for. There is no rush involved.

Jack,
Then it begs the question, why weren’t we better prepared to go into Iraq?
Why did it take so long for security to get in place? We both saw the populace running amok. That was our fault.
The senarios should have shown that the security issue was going to be a problem, yet we did nothing.
Please don’t think me so naive that we did’t run the senarios before we went. If we didn’t, how could we be that stupid?

I would seem to me that despite Bush’s saying that this would take a significant amount of time that we rushed through the opening phases as if this would be a piece of cake.

Our leaders have stumbled through one miscalculation after another. One of the biggest was assuming that we could bully or bribe Turkey into running our troops through their country. Oops.

“I see that Bush tried to work with the UN.”

So Powell goes into the UN with some doctored photos to support Bush’s claim of imminent danger.
Bush sought no support from the UN, in fact he declared them irrelevent.

Jack, this is way beyond partisan politics. This is about a bumbling, arogant, President and his Defence Secretary that couldn’t bother to take the time to plan for the complete takeover of a soverign nation.

The photos weren’t doctored, Rocky. The problem is, what you saw in those photos was only visual information. Nice if you’re tracking troop movements, not so nice if you’re trying to make the case that those tanks over there contain bio or chem agents. There are some facts that you can only get from the ground, and unfortunately, we never did that.

Jack-
There are other countries that have decieved us about WMDs lately. Why aren’t we invading them? There are other countries that have lied to us, why aren’t we invading them?

Why? Because ordinarly, the criteria for such an invasion is an uncontained threat to our national security. Put simply, Iraq wasn’t that kind of threat to us when we invade. therefore, it wasn’t the right choice. We cannot waste our blood and treasure invading countries on vague suspicions. We must get better evidence than this, if we are to strike at a time of our choosing, otherwise people will not be so willing to allow us that choice. A good reputation is grease in the wheels of foreign policy.

Ok so I misspoke on the photos. Still what those photos don’t show is what’s inside the containers. Of course we have to belive that our government is incapable of lying to us.
Right?

Lying is bad, but fallibility can strike even the honest. We need high standards so our actions don’t become such nasty moral morasses.

Hmm… High standards for intel leading to an attack on an admittedly non-imminent threat… Kind of like a “test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.”

Sounds like a no-brainer. Didn’t we used to do that?

Jack, try adding Shinseki, Zakaria, Lawrence Lindsey, or Colin Powell to your search string. There are plenty of others, but that should get you started.